


Culinary adventures as experienced by the man known as James Buchanan Barnes (The Winter Soldier)

by StrawberryLane



Series: Culinary Adventures [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Baking, Bucky Barnes & Steve Rogers Friendship, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Cats, Cooking, Domestic, Libraries, POV Bucky Barnes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-17
Updated: 2016-03-17
Packaged: 2018-05-27 07:12:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6274810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StrawberryLane/pseuds/StrawberryLane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Bucky Barnes finds an apartment, reads "Home Economics in the twentieth-century America" religiously, listens to an unhealthy dose of Simon and Garfunkel, gets adopted by a cat and goes on adventures in his kitchen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Culinary adventures as experienced by the man known as James Buchanan Barnes (The Winter Soldier)

**Author's Note:**

> I've spent the last couple of weeks listening to Simon and Garfunkel on repeat and crying about Bucky Barnes. The idea for this fic came from the apartment shown in the Civil War trailers. I hope it belongs to Bucky. He deserves some place where he can stay for a while.  
> ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

He finds an apartment. It's small and rundown; in need of renovations, but it's his and that is all he needs.

It comes already somewhat furnished, so all he has to do is get a quilt for the bed (the previous owner of the apartment left his mattress behind too) and a few things from the second hand store around the corner for the kitchen. He watches the other customers in the store and leaves after 10 minutes, having bought a plate, a glass, a mug and a set of flatware (consisting of a fork, a knife and a spoon).

He sets his purchases down onto the counter in the kitchen when he gets back to the apartment. The place is not big; there's a kitchen with a small table and two chairs, a room for sleeping in (in which there's a bed and also a brown sofa) and a bathroom with a toilet and a shower.

It's not much, but then again he's never had much to begin with. 

So it's all right. The first night he buys a hamburger and golden crispy fries from a fast food restaurant further down the street from his new building. He takes the food back to his kitchen, where he eats it, sitting in one of the chairs at the table, overlooking the street below, which is buzzing with people on their way home from wherever they've been during the day. When he's done, he rinses his plate and the glass and leaves them to dry on the counter, because he doesn't have anything to dry them with, other than his clothes or the quilt on his bed and he doesn't want to use either of those things.

 

 

* 

The next morning he goes back to the second hand store, loiters outside for 15 minutes until it opens, and then buys two towels, one for the kitchen and one for the bathroom. Then he wanders around the streets closest to his apartment and eats a breakfast of eggs, bacon and toast in cafe called The Wallflower.

He spends the day at the library. He needs to blend in, and not draw any attention to himself if he wants to avoid Hydra and the man the world knows as Captain America - the man on the bridge, the man who told him his name was James Buchanan Barnes, his best friend, if the Smithsonian is to be believed.

The best way to remain unseen is to blend in, this he knows. He is supposed to be a ghost after all. And to blend in, you need to act like other people act, enough like everybody else so that no one actually notices you. And since he can't actually follow someone around or ask someone to teach him how to behave, because that would be doing the exact opposite of what he wants to do, which is stay under the radar, he goes to the library and reads books on human behavior and observes the people there.

He walks back to his apartment after the library closes, proud new owner of a shiny library card and a plastic bag full of books he has promised to return in two weeks time. He stops by a restaurant and buys a dinner of fried chicken to go. After a bit of thought he asks to get a slice of the lemon meringue pie too. He eats the slice of pie for breakfast the next morning, and uses his new kitchen towel to dry the plate afterwards. Afterwards he goes into the bathroom and stands under the hot water for three minutes and then dries himself with the towel he bought for the bathroom. He redresses himself in the only clothes he has, and leaves his apartment.

 

He goes to the library first, returns the books he borrowed the day before, and borrows a couple of new ones. Julia, the girl who helped him get a library card, smiles and waves when she sees him. He gives a small wave back because it seems like the right thing to do under the circumstances.

The mission is to blend in, after all. He finds a book titled "Home Economics in the twentieth-century America" and reads it, cover to cover and then takes it with him when he leaves the library. He goes to a department store a few blocks away from the library. There's people everywhere, and he wants to leave and go back to his apartment, but forces himself to stay, to observe. He consults "Home Economics in the twentieth-century America", and ends up buying toothpaste, a toothbrush, shampoo, a razor, shaving cream, two shirts with long sleeves, a hoodie, a pair of jeans and a few pairs of underwear and socks (the book says you should know your size before buying clothes so Bucky watches as a man who looks like he should be about the same size as Bucky picks out a pair of jeans and then simply picks out an identical pair when the man has walked away). They fit. Kind of.

 

He also buys a backpack because the book says it's good to have something in which you can carry around other things. It also leaves his hands free so that he can defend himself without actually dropping his newly bought things in a heap onto the ground should he be attacked by someone. He buys a ham sandwich from a cafe and sits down in a park to eat it, watching the children that are playing on the playground in the middle of the park.

 

The next day he walks back to the library with "Home Economics in the twentieth-century America" in his new backpack, and asks Julia if she can help him find more books like it. As it turns out, she can. He walks back out with a dozen more books and spends the night sitting on his mattress with his quilt around his shoulders, reading.

 

In the morning he walks to a grocery store and buys a carton of eggs and a small pan. He also buys butter, because according to the book, you need butter to smear in the pan so that the eggs does not stick to the pan. He walks back to his apartment with something he thinks is nervous excitement tingling in his stomach. He hasn't felt nervous nor excited in so long, even though he knows he has before, because the memories are coming back to him now, slowly but surely. All of them, so he doesn't sleep as many hours as he probably should (according to the book you should get at least eight to nine hours of sleep a night, Bucky's lucky if he gets four).

He thinks he might be excited about being excited.

He uses the stove for the first time. Not the first time ever, but for the first time in over seventy years, and it doesn't go half bad. The eggs (two sunny side up and two over hard) comes away a little more fried than he actually wants them to be, but since he hasn't actually used a stove in such a long time, he figures he can give himself a break.

He decides he doesn't like sunny side up all that much.

 

*

He reads four chapters about the importance of cleaning your house and goes out and buys a bucket, a mop, a few rags and a bottle of something he thinks is some kind of soap (the shopkeeper tells him he just needs to take a little bit of it and some water and mop it up and the floor will be as clean as it ever was). He also buys a bottle of something that smells vaguely like lemons that the shopkeeper tells him can be used to clean his bathroom.

 

Even his hair smells like lemons, he thinks as he fries the rest of the eggs he bought that morning and eats them straight out of the pan, all while reading about the importance of keeping oneself clean. Doing laundry is apparently something that still happens, only nowadays it's in a machine and you don't have to do any of the actual work yourself. There's at least two of those machines down in the basement of the building, Bucky knows.

Laundry doesn't go as smoothly as cooking eggs did, unfortunately.

He doesn't have much in the way of clothing, and according to the book, you should always wash different colors apart from each other, so he takes the red shirt he's currently wearing (one of the three shirts he now owns) and puts it in the machine. He has nothing else that's even remotely close the color red, so he adds a bit of the washing powder that he borrowed from someone who left their box of the stuff behind. Then he pushes the button that says "ON".

 

He waits in front of the machine, watching as it whirs and cleans his shirt. He took another one of his shirts down with him, just in case someone else decides to use the laundry room at two in the morning. He'd like to keep his arm to himself, as much as possible. Captain America, Steve, is still out there, looking for him, he knows. And he doesn't really want to be found. Not yet at least. After a while, when he has begun to get bored with staring at the machine and listening to the noise, it slows down and finally stops. He waits a while longer, just in case it's not done and then opens the machine, grabbing the shirt and holding it up in front off him. It's not his shirt anymore. It has shrunk, to a size where he'd be lucky to find a child it will fit. This size will definitely not fit him, no sir. He looks at it, turning it around, inside out and back again, glaring at the machine like it can make everything all right again. Like the machine can turn his shirt back into what it was before. He glances back at the shirt again, and, unexpectedly, starts to cry. He hasn't cried since he was a child. Well, that is a lie. He cried many times during his first capture by Zola. And the second, too. He just prefers not to think of those times if he can help it. He suddenly feels grateful that no one else witnessed his freakout. He doesn't really need to be known as the guy who cries over shirts. That would be embarrassing.

He waits in the laundry room until he is certain he won't start crying again anytime soon and then walks back up the stairs to his apartment. There's an elevator, but he's not the biggest fan of small spaces that you can get stuck in unexpectedly.

He doesn't throw the shirt away. Instead he puts it in the cupboard in his kitchen, where the cleaning stuff is, because something tells him that he can always use the shirt for something, even if he can't wear it.

 

*

Bucky spends the next day shopping. He buys three cartons of eggs, a loaf of bread, ham and butter at the grocery story. He buys two more shirts (long sleeved) and another pair of jeans at the department store. He buys a packet of hair ties (bright pink).

He walks back to the grocery store and buys a bunch of apples, oranges and bananas, which he eats for lunch. The apples are good, and so are the oranges, but he doesn't understand why anyone would willingly eat the things that call themselves bananas. He actually does remember bananas, and these things aren't bananas, thank you very much.

He eats a dinner of fried eggs and sandwiches with ham and decides that he needs to buy a saucepan. Cooking like this, at home, is probably better than buying his food at cafes and restaurants, especially if he wants to save the money he stole from the Hydra base back in DC.

He decides to try the laundry machine again. This time he reads the chapter on laundry in his book three times, just to make sure he doesn't miss anything important. He doesn't want to end up with another shirt he can't wear. That's just a waste of good money. As it turns out, you actually have to set a temperature on the machine before pushing the on button. Bucky does just that and this time his shirt doesn't shrink. He may or may not have laughed - actually laughed - out loud because Yes! Meet Bucky Barnes, conqueror of laundry machines everywhere.

 

*

So, cooking. It's not something he's very familiar with, even if he knows he has eaten cooked food before. According to the Smithsonian, he did have a family growing up, and swimming around in his head are cloudy memories of a kind, tired looking woman, kids hanging from her skirt, as she heaps stew on a plate before giving it to him.

 

There are books out there dedicated to food and only food, he knows. So he does what he always does nowadays and walks to the library first thing in the morning, eating a sandwich as he goes. He gets there so early it actually hasn't opened yet. So he sits down on the steps outside, leaning against the door. He still can't shake the habit to protect his back at all times and if he's honest with himself he's not sure he actually wants to. It's a useful habit to have. The sun is shining and it seems like it'll be a warm, happy kind of day. Bucky closes his eyes for a few seconds, soaking in the sunshine. It was a long time since he actually cared about the sun, he thinks. The sound of footfalls reaches his ears and he looks up. Julia, the girl who helped him with both library card and finding more books like "Home Economics in the twentieth-century America" is walking towards him.

"Hi, James!" She says as she comes to a stop a few steps away from him, "Extra early today, even before me," she removes one of the white things (earphones, he knows), in her ears, and smiles at him. He can hear music coming from the earphones, and it's the sound of a guitar and someone singing of the sound of silence. He decides he likes it. He nods, to answer her question and says "Couldn't sleep. What's that music?"

"Oh, this? It's two guys called Simon and Garfunkel, they're pretty good actually. I think you'd like them," Julia says as she opens the door to the library and turns off the alarm and the lights on.

"Where can I find them?" Bucky asks as he follows her over to her desk, where she puts her earphones in her bag and puts her bag behind the desk, where no one can touch it but her.

"We've got some CD's over there, in the corner, if you'd like to borrow some. Pretty sure we've got at least one record of theirs. Now, what have brought you here so early, aside from the fact that you couldn't sleep?"

"I... I want to learn how to cook," Bucky mumbles, suddenly feeling slightly unsure. From what he remembers, men don't really cook, not unless they absolutely have to, like Steve did. And from what Bucky can remember, Steve was never that great a cook, he could only cook so much that he'd get by and not starve.

"Good for you!" Julia says, bringing him back from his memories, "Come with me, and I'll show you where the cookbooks are. Have you got any special preferences? Like, are you vegetarian or vegan? Any allergies? Anything in particular you'd like to learn?"

He just shakes his head, "I want to learn everything," he blurts out, before realizing it's true. He does want to learn everything, starting with feeding himself. Julia walks with him through several aisles of bookshelves before coming to a stop close to the back of the library. There's so many books dedicated to cooking and books dedicated to food. He feels like he has to sit down just from looking at the shelves.

"Overwhelming, isn't it?" Julia asks, "This is just a suggestion, but if I were you, I'd sit down in one of those comfy chairs over there, and I'd begin with this one," she holds up a book that proclaims "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" and the names Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle and Julia Child on its front cover.

"It's a classic. They wrote it so that american cooks could cook real french food. There's even a movie about it, kinda, called Julie & Julia."

"Thank you," Bucky says, taking the book from her and settling down in the chair closest to the wall.

"No problem, holler if you need me," Julia says over her shoulder as she walks away, leaving him staring at "Mastering the Art of French Cooking. The book is full of recipes. Page after page has his mouth watering, even if he ate on the way to the library. He reads the book from cover to cover and then puts it down on the table in front of him. It's the start of his "books I'm borrowing" pile, and during the course of the day, it grows until it's taller than him. The books are in alphabetical order on the shelves, so after reading the French cooking one, he simply picks out the first book under the letter A.

He's so engrossed in his reading that he doesn't even notice that it gets darker around him until Julia appears from behind a bookshelf and informs him that the library is closing in ten minutes and if he wants to bring any of those books in the pile home with him, he should get over to her desk pronto. He does, and she issues the books for him. She also gives him another bag to carry them in, because all of them won't fit into his backpack. And then she gives him a CD titled "The Definitive Simon & Garfunkel."

"What was the first thing you ever cooked?" He asks before he leaves. "By myself? Probably Mac n Cheese," Julia says and smiles.

Mac n Cheese has only a few ingredients, according to one of the cookbooks he picked out at the library. So he walks to the grocery store and buys macaroni, cheese, milk, flour, pepper and salt, a saucepan and a whisk.

Back at his apartment he dumps the books on the sofa in his bedroom, before taking a deep breath and returning to the kitchen. He cooks the macaroni and when it's done, puts it on his plate because he only has one saucepan and he needs it for the sauce. He cuts the cheese in smaller cubes after very thoroughly washing the knife he keeps on himself at all times, a knife that isn't technically made for cooking with but is the only one he has that he actually feels comfortable using in the kitchen. Then he melts butter in the saucepan, adds a bit a flour and whisks it until it's become a sort of paste. He then adds milk and whisks some more until the whole thing thickens. Then he adds the cheese and a bit of salt and pepper. He whisks some more until the cheese is totally melted and then dumps the macaroni back into the saucepan.

It is good. It is very good. He eats it straight out of the saucepan with a spoon.

 

*

He buys a couple of pens and a notebook the next day and sits down at his kitchen table when he gets back to his apartment and writes down the name of the food, the page number and the name of the book whenever he finds something in his pile of cookbooks that he thinks would be nice to eat.

The first thing on his list is vegetable soup. He writes down all of the ingredients, just to be sure he remembers them once he gets to the store, and brings the notebook with him. He buys a little more of everything than he actually needs for the soup, mostly because that's what the rest of the people shopping seemed to do and he, again, wants to blend in.

He ignores the fact that lunch is hours away still and dumps all of the vegetables onto the kitchen table right next to the pile of books. He chops an onion, a few pieces of garlic, tomatoes, celery, potatoes, carrots and broccoli before scooping them into the saucepan. He adds one cup of water and two cups of something called vegetable broth that the recipe tells him he must use or else and brings it to a boil and let's it simmer for what he thinks is about fifteen minutes (he doesn't actually own a watch. Never did) and then adds a bit of salt. He's just about to reach into the cupboard for a bowl when he remembers that he doesn't have one. So instead he pours some of the soup into the mug that he does have, and eats it like that instead. When he's eaten all of the soup he takes his notebook and writes "needs more salt" in the margin, next to the list of ingredients.

He throws the kitchen towel into the washing machine together with a pair of his jeans and a shirt, because the towel got dirty when he cleaned up the counter after cutting the tomatoes directly on it. Maybe he should get a chopping board?

 

*

The next thing on his list is chicken and noodle soup. So he stops by the department store and buys two bowls, a chopping board and a couple of actual kitchen knives. He also buys a ladle, because that seems like a thing you should have when you're making soup. He also buys a chicken.

 

Making the soup isn't all that difficult. There's a couple more steps than what he's cooked before, because apparently the chicken needs to be cooked before he can add the rest of the ingredients. According to the cookbook, he is supposed to cook the whole chicken until the meat literally falls off the bones. He's excited to try it out so he decides that cooking the chicken beforehand can't be that important. So he chops the chicken, onion, garlic, carrots and celery into smaller pieces and adds the chicken, vegetables and a few cups of water and vegetable broth in his pot and let's it simmer for a while. After a while, when it seems like an appropriate amount of time has passed, he adds some of the macaroni he has left over since he made macaroni and cheese the other night. The recipe calls for noodles, but there can't be that much of a difference between the two he thinks.

Even more time passes, and he is starting to get seriously hungry. So he eats the soup after pouring it into one of his newly purchased bowls, using his new ladle. The chicken is still pink, which he knows it probably shouldn't be, but he can't bring himself to wait even a minute more. It's his life now, dammit, he can make his own decisions. Even if they only involve eating chicken. Hydra probably never let him eat chicken, he can't remember if they ever did.

 

*

Eating the soup before the chicken was fully cooked through turns out to be a mistake. He doesn't throw up, but he feels uneasy, and his stomach hurts a bit. At least he thinks it's the chicken's fault. He spends the night next to the toilet, just in case, reading "Home Economics in the twentieth-century America" even though he's read cover to cover at least twentyfive times by now. He knows most of it by heart, but he likes looking at the pictures, tracing the pages with his fingers. It calms him down.

 

The book says it's bad for the nature and the planet to throw food away and there's something inside him that tells him he needs to save all the food he can, because a) it's always been like that, b) he'll never know when he might actually have use for two liters of chicken and noodle soup. So he let's the soup simmer on the stove some more, because maybe that'll make the chicken done enough to eat and then goes out to get a few plastic containers that he fills with soup and puts in the freezer. He doesn't like the freezer, it reminds him a little too much of the ice box they used to put him in, but he'll admit it comes in handy to have one now.

Next, he makes broccoli soup of the leftover broccoli. He decides he doesn't actually like broccoli soup. It tastes bland, no matter how many different spices he uses. Adding the chili powder he bought turns out to be a mistake. It goes quite nicely with the tomato soup he makes next though, so it wasn't a complete waste of time and money to buy spices after all.

Noodles is next on his list, and it seems a bit boring on its own. So he buys mushroom and cream on a whim and cooks it with onion and garlic and a bit of salt and pepper and it turns out to be the best thing he's ever put in his mouth. The noodles are absolutely drenched in creamy mushrooms and he thinks that if he has to choose something to eat for the rest of his life, this would be it. It's heaven.

 

*

Weeks go by without him really noticing. He's busy cooking his way through the cookbooks. Spaghetti and meat sauce is good. Very good. It's not difficult to make either, which means he makes way more than he actually needs for dinner and ends up having to go get more of those plastic containers to store the food in the fridge and freezer. Both freezer and fridge are becoming kind of crowded, really, with all the food he's been cooking lately. Bucky can't bring himself to care, because he's never had this much food at once before.

 

He adopts a cat.

Or rather, the cat adopts him. He calls her Orange, because, well, she's orange. They meet each other in the back alley behind the apartment building. She's missing an ear and walks up to him without even a flicker of fear. Orange the cat is not afraid of him at all, even though all other animals, humans included, seem more or less wary of him. Bucky can think of two living creatures who are not afraid of him. Orange and Steve Rogers, who, mind you, probably wouldn't know danger if it bit him in the ass.

 

Anyway. Orange follows him home. All the way through the front door, up the stairs, through his door, through the kitchen and into the bedroom, where she jumps up on the window sill, tail flicking back and forth. He tries to make her leave. She ignores him. He lifts her up and carries her to his door with his metal hand. Closing the door in her face makes him feel oddly...sad. It doesn't matter anyway, because the next time he opens the door she just sneaks right back in again. This happens even when he carries her down the stairs and sets her down onto the street outside. She just sneaks back inside to wait outside his door whenever the door to the building opens.

So he starts feeding her. She needs food, he knows. Everybody needs food. And because she seems to have no desire to find food on her own, as she spends most of her time finding new ways to get into his apartment, he decides it's in her best interest if he gives her food. And his best interest too, if he wants her to stay around, which he might actually want, not that he'll ever admit it. He walks to one of his favorite places on the planet, the library, and learns, with Julia's help, how to use a computer. It's not that difficult, but he appreciates the help she gives him anyways.

 

He buys a small bag of cat food, because it seems like the easiest option, but he learns that cats can apparently eat vegetables too, at least some, so he serves Orange cooked carrots, broccoli and green beans. She doesn't seem to like the broccoli and Bucky decides they are probably meant for each other.

Orange eats everything he puts in front of her, from cat food to left over meat to cooked carrots and green beans. All in all, they co-exist pretty well in their little apartment.

 

*

The next couple of weeks after him and Orange officially adopting each other is a blur of cat hair everywhere, buying new clothes that fit better than the old ones, cleaning soap that smells like lemon, vegetable stew, steak and potatoes, both boiled and baked in the oven, the heavenly dish that is lasagna with extra cheese and Simon and Garfunkel played loudly and on repeat on an old shitty cd player he found at the second hand store. The Boxer, I am a rock and Homeward Bound are his favorites.

He tries to make chicken pot pie, and makes sure to cook the chicken thoroughly this time around.

 

And then he moves on to baking. And finds that he has quite a sweet tooth. The first couple of times he tries to make his own bread they fall flat. Literally. The pictures all portray big round loafs of bread, instead of the flat, sad looking thing he ends up with. But he doesn't give up, instead staying up all night several nights in a row until he finally succeeds, after which he collapses on his bed in a heap, turning his head to look at Orange, who has declared ownership of his pillow.

"That wasn't so difficult, now was it?" He asks the cat, who blinks slowly at him before licking at her own paw.

 

Cookies turn out to be easier, if only because they still taste good even after he kind of forgot about them in the oven and burned them slightly. He makes all sorts of different cookies; Chocolate chip cookies, Oatmeal Raisin, Peanut Butter cookies, sugar cookies, snickerdoodles and ginger bread cookies, despite the fact that it's in the middle of summer, to name a few. He eats to much ginger bread dough and gets a stomach ache, but it's worth totally it.

 

Next, he bakes cakes. He makes angel food cake, red velvet cake, banana bread, apple cake, apple pie, brownies, brownies using avocado, cupcakes, Boston cream pie, banoffee pie, devil's food cake, carrot cake and chocolate cake.

One night he makes Depression cake, which brings back so many memories he has to lie down on his bed with Orange on his stomach just staring in to the empty space around him without even cleaning up in the kitchen.

 

*

When he gets back from his grocery shopping one sunny day in September, Steve Rogers is sitting on the stairs outside of his apartment. Orange, the traitor, is doing her best to leave pieces of her hair all over the man.

"Bucky, please," Steve says as Bucky entertains the thought of backing out the door and running down the street for all he's worth. He'd have to let go of his groceries for optimal running speed though, and there's mushrooms and cream and pasta in there, and it's just not worth letting go of that.

So instead he walks up the stairs and opens the door to his apartment instead, watching as Steve stands up and tries to get rid of the worst of the cat hair from his jeans.

"Would you like to come in for dinner?" he asks Steve and somehow the question makes him feel both shy and unsure.

"I'd love to, Buck," Steve says and the smile on his face could probably give more than enough energy for this building to survive for a week. It makes Bucky smile too. He opens the door wider to let both them and the cat in.

"Shush," he tells Orange, who is rubbing her face against his legs and meowing at him, "I'm busy. I have a dinner to prepare."

 

 


End file.
